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Joint time synchronization and tracking for mobile underwater systems

Published: 11 November 2013 Publication History

Abstract

Time synchronization and localization are key requirements for distributed underwater systems consisting of numerous low-cost submersibles. In these systems, submersibles are highly resource constrained and typically have limited acoustic communication capability. We investigate the problem of time synchronization and tracking for submersibles that only have the capability to receive acoustic signals. Traditional Long Base Line (LBL) systems track the location of submersibles by providing a GPS-like infrastructure that consists of a few reference beacons at known locations. In these systems the unknown positions of submersibles are estimated from beacon transmissions using time-difference-of-arrival (TDoA) based localization. As such TDoA makes the key assumption that beacon transmissions occur nearly concurrently in time. While this assumption is ensured in small LBL deployments it does not hold as the size of the system scales up. In this paper we identify scenarios where signals from multiple beacons are significantly lagged in time. We further identify the motion of the submersible between signal arrivals as a key factor that deteriorates the performance of TDoA, when transmissions are not concurrent. To address this problem we propose to track the submersible while performing time-synchronization. Our proposed technique, called Time of Arrival based Tracked Synchronization (ToA-TS) essentially extends GPS like localization for scenarios where beacon transmissions are not concurrent and submersibles are not capable of two-way communication.

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  • (2018)Mobile Node Localization in Underwater Wireless NetworksIEEE Access10.1109/ACCESS.2018.27956006(17232-17244)Online publication date: 2018
  • (2016)Pair-Wise Collision-Based Underwater Time SynchronizationJournal of Network and Systems Management10.1007/s10922-016-9364-124:4(813-833)Online publication date: 1-Oct-2016
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      cover image ACM Conferences
      WUWNet '13: Proceedings of the 8th International Conference on Underwater Networks & Systems
      November 2013
      374 pages
      ISBN:9781450325844
      DOI:10.1145/2532378
      Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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      Publication History

      Published: 11 November 2013

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      Author Tags

      1. acoustic networks
      2. real-time tracking
      3. underwater networks

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      WUWNET '13
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      WUWNET '13: Conference on Underwater Networks and Systems
      November 11 - 13, 2013
      Kaohsiung, Taiwan

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      WUWNet '13 Paper Acceptance Rate 11 of 55 submissions, 20%;
      Overall Acceptance Rate 84 of 180 submissions, 47%

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      View all
      • (2024)Combined UAMP and MF Message Passing Algorithm for Multi-Target Wideband DOA Estimation with Dirichlet Process PriorTsinghua Science and Technology10.26599/TST.2023.901011429:4(1069-1081)Online publication date: Aug-2024
      • (2018)Mobile Node Localization in Underwater Wireless NetworksIEEE Access10.1109/ACCESS.2018.27956006(17232-17244)Online publication date: 2018
      • (2016)Pair-Wise Collision-Based Underwater Time SynchronizationJournal of Network and Systems Management10.1007/s10922-016-9364-124:4(813-833)Online publication date: 1-Oct-2016
      • (2015)ToA-TSAd Hoc Networks10.1016/j.adhoc.2014.10.01034:C(211-223)Online publication date: 1-Nov-2015

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